No Man Is An Island
by AnnaMariaNordlade
Summary: What did Will think during his conversation with Tessa in the drawing room after the training?


**Hello. I have just come back from my cousin's wedding. Are you all fine? Here is a one-shot about Tessa and Will's conversation about Will's visit to the Warlock Den in Clockwork Prince in Will's point of view. Please remember to review and tell what you liked. Enjoy. :-)**

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_No man is an island,_

_Entire of itself,_

_Every man is a piece of the continent,_

_A part of the main._

_If a clod be washed away by the sea,_

_Europe is the less._

_As well as if a promontory were._

_As well as if a manor of thy friend's_

_Or of thine own were:_

_Any man's death diminishes me,_

_Because I am involved in mankind,_

_And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; _

_It tolls for thee._

John Donner, No man is an island.

No man is an island:

I followed Tessa as she tried to reach Gabriel Lightwood. I didn't think he deserved an apology after what he said about Charlotte. But as the situation was I couldn't blame her, we didn't need more troubles. But by the Angel it was hilarious then Sophie hit him. All that training must had given her a bad influence.

"Tessa," I called. My heart was jumping by the sound of her name. She turned around and saw me.

"_Why_ are you following me?" she hissed. I felt at once unwanted. She didn't want me around her. "Will, you shouldn't have left them alone. You must go back to the training room, right away."

"Why?" I asked.

Tessa threw up her hand in frustration. "Don't men notice anything? Gideon has designs on Sophie."

What? Should _Gideon_ fancy Sophie? I wouldn't be surprise that any man would fall for Sophie, but _Gideon_?

"On _Sophie_?"

"She's a very beautiful girl." Tessa rolled with her eyes. "You're an idiot if you haven't noticed the way he looks at her, but I don't want him taking advantage of her. She's had enough such troubles in her life – and besides, if you are with me, Gabriel won't talk to me. You know he won't."

I was not an idiot. If Gideon had looked at Sophie, I haven't notice because I was busy looking at Tessa and annoying Gabriel.

"Stubborn girl," I muttered and took her wrist. "Here. Come with me."

I drag her right into the drawing room and over to the windows – the window I had looked out to see if my parent ever came again after me. I released her wrist and we both looked at the Lightwood carriage that drove off.

"There," I said as I slipped my hands against each other to get rid of the warm feeling from her skin. "Gabriel's gone anyway, unless you want to chase after the carriage." That would have looked amusing. "And Sophie's perfectly sensible. She's not going to let Gideon Lightwood have his way with her. Besides, he is about as charming as a postbox."

Then she suddenly began laughing. What had just happen? I wasn't trying to be amusing. But watching her laugh was a delightful change from the worried and sad look in her eyes, she usually had.

"I must be more amusing than I thought. Which would make me very amusing indeed."

"I'm not laughing at you," she giggled. "Just – oh. The look on Gabriel's face when Sophie slapped him. My goodness." She took a deep breath as she pushed her face away from her face. "I really shouldn't be laughing." Why not? It was nice to see her laugh. "Half the reason he was so awful was you goading him. I should be angry with you."

"Oh, _should_," I repeated joyfully as I sat down in the chair near the fire, hiding my sadness. "No good sentences ever include the word 'should.' I _should_ have paid the tavern bill; now they're coming to break my legs. I _should_ never have run off with my best friend's wife; now she devils me constantly. I _should _–"

"You should," Tessa said, "think about the way the things you do affect Jem."

I rolled my head back and looked at her. She was there looking at me like scornful angel.

"Is this a serious conversation now, Tess?"

She sat down in the chair across me. The flames from the fire seemed to light up her brown hair.

"Aren't you worried that he's cross with you? He's your _parabatai_. And he's Jem. He's never cross."

Jem was never angry with me for very long. I don't see what was wrong?

"Perhaps it's better that he's cross with me," I said. "So much saintlike patience cannot be good for anybody."

"Do not mock him," Tessa said sharply.

"Nothing is beyond mockery, Tess." Damn, I have to be careful with using that nickname.

"Jem is," Tess said. "He has always been good to you." Yes, I knew that. Jem had in the last five years been my only friend. My greatest sin. "He is nothing that goodness. That he hit you last night, that only shows how capable you are of driving even saints to madness."

Wait, what?

"_Jem_ hit me?" Without thinking I touched the bruises on my face. The world never stops surprising me. I have thought that somebody from the den had been annoyed at me or something like that, but _Jem_?

"I must confess, I remember very little from last night. Only that the two of you woke me, though I very much wanted to stay asleep." And stay with my dream-Tessa in dream-Wales. "I remember Jem shouting at me…," But not that he _hit_ me. "… and you holding me. I knew it was you. You always smell of lavender."

She didn't to hear me. "Well, Jem hit you. And you deserved it."

"You _do_ look scornful –" When I was with her, it seemed like my thoughts just – jump out of my mouth before I could think about it. "rather like Raziel in all those painting, as if he were looking down on us. So tell me, scornful angel, what did I do to deserved being hit in the face by Jem?"

She looked at me thoughtful, like she was trying to figure a way to communicate with me. "You know," she began, "in that essay of Donne's, what he says –"

"'License my roving hands, and let them go'?" I quoted to tease her.

She narrowed her eyes at me. "I meant the _essay_ about how no man is an island. Everything you do touch others. Yet you never think about it. You behave as if you live on some sort of – of Will Island, and none of your actions can have consequences. Yet they do."

"How does my going to a warlock den affect Jem?" I asked. "I suppose he had to come and haul me out, but he's done more dangerous things in the past for me. We protect each other – "

"No, you _don't_," she interrupted frustratingly. "Do you think he cares about danger? Do you? His whole life has been destroyed by this drug, this _yin fen_, and there you go off to a warlock den and drug yourself up as if it doesn't even matter, as if it's just a game to you. He has to take this foul stuff every day just so he can live, but in the meantime it's killing him. He hates being dependent on it. He can't even bring himself to buy it; he has _you_ do that." I tried to protest, but Tessa stop me by holding up a hand at me. She wouldn't show me any mercy. "And then _you_ swan down to Whitechapel and throw your money at the people who make these drugs and addict other people to them, as if it were some sort of holiday on the continent for you. What were you thinking?"

I was thinking about my family and wanted to stop thinking about them. But I didn't say that. Instead I said: "But it had nothing to do with Jem at all –"

"You didn't think about him," Tessa said. It was not a question. It was a matter-of-fact. "But perhaps you should have. Don't you understand he thinks you made a mockery out of what's killing him? And you're supposed to be his brother."

_And you're supposed to be his brother. _I felt like I got a bucket of ice-cold water thrown right into my face. Jem. Did my Jem hate me?

_I have lost everything._

"He can't think that," I said. He can't, or else I would be… alone. Jem was all I had. It was because of him that I'm still – alive, still existing. _What have I done?_ I felt like I was beginning to fade, beginning to vanish out of the blue.

"He does," Tessa said. "He understands you don't care what other people think about you. But I believe he always excepted you'd care what he thought. What he felt."

I leaned forward. I still felt a bit shaken by the thoughts of Jem hating me.

"I do care what others think," I said before I could stop myself. "It's all I think about – what others think, what they feel about me, and I about them; it drives me mad. I wanted to escape – "

"You can't mean that. Will Herondale, minding what others think of him?"

Her words began a culmination in my mind. Tatiana's diary with all whose love poems, Gabriel who never hide his disgust about me. Charlotte who probably already given up on me. Ella who was now in the other life and was crying over me.

I thought about my parents and Cecily. They were still alive, but did that mean that they had forgotten about me or that there will still go some time before the curse would hit them? The fact that Mortmain had them in his power could in a way be caused by the curse.

I thought about Jem, my greatest sin, who I may lose now. I couldn't lose him. He was the only person I could allow myself to have close to me. Would he ever forgive me for what I have done to him?

I looked at Tessa, the girl who I was hopeless in love with. The girl who had once been ready to trust me with her heart, only to have it thrown back in her face by me. The girl who probably now hated me.

I had read her letters. As books had been honest to me, her letters had been honest. They had told a story about a lonely sad girl imprisoned by people who tormented her. Her fears of being alone in the world. Her battle to remain strong to project someone she loved (even if he didn't deserve it). Her misery over having an ability, she didn't asked for, being tortured for.

I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but… I was afraid. Afraid that one touch could bind a bond that I couldn't cut off before it would be too late. Afraid that if I took her hand, I would drag her into my arms and never let her go.

I wanted to share my secrets with her, but… for what price?

"Tess." The nickname escaped my mouth like a whisper. "That is _all_ I think about. I never look at you without thinking what you feel about me and fearing –"

Suddenly the door opened up and Charlotte walked in followed by Woolsey Scott.

… _fearing that you love me. That you are in danger from me._

"Oh. Tessa, Will – I didn't realize you were in here."

I was saved. I had so closed to destroy the wall I had built around me. I could feel my hands were in fists. It almost hurt burying my nails into my flesh.

I had been so close to tell Tessa the truth.


End file.
